"Sixteen Tons" is a song about the life of a coal miner, first recorded in 1946 by American country singer Merle Travis and released on his box set album Folk Songs of the Hillsthe following year. A 1955 version recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford reached number one in the Billboard charts, while another version by Frankie Laine was released only in the United Kingdom, where it gave Ford's version some stiff competition.

Travis claimed authorship of the song, but a competing claim was made by George S. Davis.

The chorus of "Sixteen Tons" is:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?, Another day older and deeper in debt., Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go;, I owe my soul to the company store.

According to Travis, the line from the chorus "another day older and deeper in debt" was a phrase often used by his father, a coal miner himself. This and the line "I owe my soul to the company store" is a reference to the truck system and to debt bondage. Under this system workers were not paid cash; rather they were paid with unexchangeable credit vouchers for goods at the company store, usually referred to as scrip. This made it impossible for workers to store up cash savings. Workers also usually lived in company-owned dormitories or houses, the rent for which was automatically deducted from their pay. In the United States the truck system and associated debt bondage persisted until the strikes of the newly-formed United Mine Workers and affiliated unions forced an end to such practices.

However, "Sixteen Tons" is not simply sociology. While the choruses refer to the difficulties of life in coal camps, the verses depict a mythos of toughness in the face of adversity.

A dispute exists regarding the authorship of "Sixteen Tons". While the song is generally attributed to Merle Travis, to whom it is credited on his 1947 recording, George S. Davis, a folk singer and songwriter who had been a coal miner in Kentucky, claimed when he was recorded for Folkways in 1966 to have written the song as "Nine-to-ten tons" in the 1930s. Davis' recording of his version of the song appears on the albums George Davis: When Kentucky Had No Union Menand Classic Mountain Songs from Smithsonian.

In 1955 Sixteen Tonswas recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford as the b-side of his cover of the Moon Mullican standard, "You Don't Have to Be a Baby to Cry". It hit Billboard's Country Music charts in November and held the #1 position for ten weeks, then crossed over and held the #1 position on the pop music charts for eight weeks, besting the competing version by Johnny Desmond. In the United Kingdom, Ford's version competed with versions by Edmund Hockridge and Frankie Laine. Laine's version was not released in the United States, but sold well in the U.K.: it was released on October 17 and by October 28 had sold 400,000 copies. On November 10, a million copies had been sold; two million were sold by December 15. Another early cover was the one recorded by The Platters in 1957.

The song has been covered by a wide variety of musicians:

Also: